


Spaghetti and Meatballs

by amaradangeli



Series: We Made It [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Cooking, Episode: s03e17 A Hundred Days, F/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 17:04:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1477330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaradangeli/pseuds/amaradangeli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack gets stranded, Sam builds a particle accelerator, Jack gets meatballs.  Sounds like a fair trade, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spaghetti and Meatballs

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Note: Post A Hundred Days. How could this not be angsty?
> 
> [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/semiresponsive1/35747237832/in/album-72157683563675853/)  
> Artwork by Samantha-Carter-is-my-muse

She stands on his front stoop for so long he finally breaks in on her train of thought by pulling the door open and waving her inside.

“You look like hell, Carter.”

Her chin wobbles and she takes a deep, steadying breath before thrusting a plate of handmade meatballs and jar of spaghetti sauce at him and shouldering by.  She doesn’t go to the kitchen.  She makes for the bathroom.  He curses and closes the door.

He’s poured the wine and put the meatballs in the oven by the time she reappears.

“I, uh… I’m sorry,” he says.

“No, you’re right.  I haven’t been sleeping.”

“You’ve been sitting up nights learning to make meatballs?” he guesses.

She shoots him a caustic look.  “My next door neighbor made them.  Apparently I looked pathetic enough to warrant a meal delivery.”

“Don’t people usually bring food that’s already…I dunno…cooked?”  Anyway, now that she’s mentioned it, she does look kind of pathetic – in that sweet stray sort of way. He should have noticed how head shy she’s become, the dark circles under her eyes, the way she looks like a stiff wind or stiff drink would put her down.  

He doesn’t know what to tell her.  He doesn’t know know how to make it right. Between the emotional gamut he ran on Edora and the covert mission he’s just been tapped for, there’s little he can say. 

_Hey, Carter, I don’t know what it is we’re doing here, but I can’t pretend you don’t make eyes at me sometimes and I can’t pretend I don’t try to make you smile at me all the time; because I settled for a woman on another planet and actually started to have feelings for her.  Oh, and while we’re at it, this is probably the last time you’re ever going to show up at my place for something non-work related because I’m about to treat you like the asshole I’ve always tried to prove I’m really not.  Wanna hit the mattresses just in case we’ve really got a spark so we can enjoy it before I screw it up?_

He figures he’s probably a presumptuous ass. Whatever she’s doing is kid-stuff; maybe a little harmless flirting with a safe CO, nothing serious, just a little fun and ego bump.  Hell, maybe Carter just likes a little illicit thrill.  Maybe she’s just another in a long line taken by good looks and the Eagle on his shoulder.  Anyway, he’s not stupid. He’d seen the kicked-puppy look on her face when he’d walked away from her.  So yeah, she’s probably working on a _bit_ of a crush.  But, he is too, so it’s not like he can fault her for it. 

Sure, that could be it.  But that’s not really Carter’s style.  She’s not frivolous.  And she really does look like hell.  That doesn’t seem very not-serious.  Hell, maybe it’s just his ego talking and whatever it is that’s eating her doesn’t have anything to do with his careless dismissal of her ability to re-plot the future of physics. 

“They tell me you invented something while I was gone.”

“A particle accelerator.  Yes.”

“That sounds…fancy.”

“Not fancy.  Just difficult.”

“You know, I…uh…I didn’t thank you for—“

“Can you not?” she exhales the words like she’d been holding her breath too long.  In a way, maybe she had.

 “Carter?”

“It never occurred to me that you didn’t need to come home, you know?  And I get it – you came to terms with a new life, and you met someone and started over. But we worked _really_ hard to bring you back and you just walked away from me…” she trails off uncomfortably as if she’s said too much. “You walked away from _us,”_ she tries again, “like we’d just ruined your schedule. It’s not about _thank you_ , Colonel, it’s about being god damned grateful that there are some people here who thought enough of you to…” she stops and turns away from him, shoulders heaving.

He waits for the smell of ground beef and spices to permeate the air, to give him something to pull her focus to, but it’s too early yet.

She slugs back the glass of wine he poured for her and then takes off for the front door.

“Damn it,” he chases after her, “Carter!”

He catches up to her next to her car. “You came here to talk, right?” She won’t meet his eyes, but she nods. “Okay.  So talk.  Yell. Do whatever you have to do.”

She laughs mirthlessly.  “I don’t _have_ to do any of it. Because tomorrow, the sun will come up over the SGC and you’ll still be the Colonel and I’ll still be the Major and none of this is going to matter.  It _doesn’t matter_ , anything I say here tonight.”

As much as he hates to admit it, she’s right. Especially knowing what’s coming. In a few days’ time, he’s going to turn her world upside-down with the theft of ally technology and it won’t matter if he takes steps tonight to repair their relationship or not. Because she’s going to push him after all that happens, and he’s going to have to hurt her. But as advantageous as it may be, he can’t make himself go out of his way to hurt her tonight. Not when she’s obviously already hurting so badly.

He reaches out, fingers the ends of her hair, she ducks away. “C’mon,” he says, “we’ll eat dinner and you can just be mad at me.”

“I am mad,” she says but follows him up his front walk. “And I’m glad you’re back.”

“Whether you believe me or not, I am too.”

“What about Laira?” she says as she settles onto the stool in the kitchen.

He tenses at the sound of the other woman’s name. He spent every day with her for more than three months and he feels her absence sharply, especially in the space he’d fantasized about bringing her to; more, knowing that if he’d met her on Earth she’s exactly the kind of woman who would have turned his head. She was kind and caring, more than a little attractive, strong and respectable.  He had started to feel towards her the way he had, at one point, felt about his wife.  Not the same strong feelings that led him to marriage, but at least the ones that got him to those strong feelings in the first place.  Hell, for all he really knows, she’s pregnant and he’s missing another chance to be a father.  But thinking down that road isn’t going to do any of them any favors, least of all him.

He puts water on to boil and pours the sauce into a pot with some spices before he answers.  “I guess it’s not really important anymore, is it?”

“I got the impression you two had gotten…close.”

“We had,” he says with finality she respects.

He’d had an uncomfortable conversation with the base CMO about alien STDs, too, but there’s no need to tell her that. After that was another uncomfortable conversation about how close, exactly, he’d gotten to his second-in-command.  Being that he could still answer the Carter question honestly, said second-in-command didn’t need to know about that either.  These little dinners of theirs, while not _entirely_ against the rules, were private.  Not secret.  At least not right now. Not for a while if he gets that uncomfortable kind of lucky where she’s heartsick over his dalliance with Laira. Especially not after how personally she’s going to take the events of the next however long it takes to flush out the bad guys.

“You would have stayed,” she says and he wonders if it’s sadness, resignation or the death of something that tinges her voice.

“I might not have had a choice.”

“Didn’t it occur to you that we’d come by ship if we couldn’t recover the gate?”

“Either way I was in for an extended vacation. Which part pissed you off? That I prepared to stay or that I didn’t immediately jump through the gate to come home?”

“I don’t know,” she says hotly.

“Well, that’s not helpful at all!”  Then he realizes he’s shouting at her and crushing a box of spaghetti in his hands.  She doesn’t look very sure in her anger.  He thinks he probably doesn’t either.

“Can’t I make a salad or something?” she asks in the same angry voice.

He spins around and starts rooting through the fridge. He’s shoved a cucumber, a bell pepper, a carrot and a bunch of radishes into her hands when he starts to chuckle. It’s been a lot of years since he’s fought with a woman over something he doesn’t understand. Even so, he remembers incongruous statements thrown into heated discussion and it feels so damn familiar it hurts in the good places.

“What?” she huffs at him and then starts laughing too.

They’re quiet while she makes little salads in his soup bowls and he makes the pasta and fiddles with the seasonings in the sauce. She pours him another glass of wine when he finishes his and somewhere along the way they swap glasses but he doesn’t say anything. 

He likes the way they move around his kitchen together. She’s useless with anything that requires heat and he finds that surprising, incongruous, and a little convenient, but he really likes that she’s not fucking perfect at every damn thing. She stands her ground when he brushes close, turns her hips to give him space but doesn’t move her feet. Mostly he likes the way she doesn’t flinch away when his wrist brushes against her waist.

She sits in his chair again, he puts a plate down in front of her, she pushes meatballs around in the sauce, and he doesn’t give her too hard a time about pretending to eat.

“Thanks,” he says, when she slides a hunk of cooked tomato off the tines of her fork onto his plate.  He knows the texture makes her shiver. 

She smiles.

“No, Sam.  Thanks. For figuring out how to get me home.”

She smiles again, ducks her head and blushes. “You’re welcome.”

Damn it.  Damn it, shit and sonuvabitch.  He wants to say something to her, anything to let her know that the things he’s about to say and do aren’t really him and that they have nothing to do with her. He wants her to blush when she looks at him and he wants her to do it with that smile, the one with a hint of her tongue behind her teeth.  He wants to tell her he’d pour her another glass of wine if things were different. But he can’t tell her that and he certainly can’t do it. 

To be safe he doesn’t say anything.  He doesn’t offer her a bowl of the salted caramel ice cream he’d bought with her in mind.  When she leaves he tries not to smile too softly, tries in the small ways he can to ease the transition.

The next day at the grocery store he doesn’t buy the wine she likes because she won’t be showing up for dinner any time soon.

 

 


End file.
